I Made a List...of Books That Will Speak To Your Soul

*and maybe make you cry

Lately, I have found myself wanting to ache. To yearn. To mourn, grieve, to feel.

I miss an older version of myself that has barely existed for a few years. It’s a version that thrived when I was in school, constantly consuming literature, poetry, history, art, and anthropology. I miss the feeling I’d get when a book showed me a new way to look at the world that was so profound, so raw, so heartbreakingly true, that it would stick in my head for days. I miss feeling connected to centuries of the human experience through learning about people who came before me, who may be separated from me through the reaches of time, but who still felt the same things I feel today.

I miss feeling smart, when I would finish a text that I had to grapple with and know that I was walking away changed. I miss feeling stupid, when I would encounter an idea or work of art that I didn’t yet understand, and I knew I must work hard to expand my thinking to do so. Most of all, I miss the feeling of exercising my mind.

Brainrot is a funny word, because knowing what it means indicates that you’re already “online” enough to have experienced some of it. It’s the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, and it’s defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

A side effect of brainrot for me is numbness. I have access to a globe’s worth of news, opinions, discourse, and emotions through the internet, and as I get older, the more I feel myself shutting down. I don’t have to work to understand or process so much of what I see online, because it may be raw, but it can too often be garish and obvious. In the face of such two-dimensional content, I shut down. And I don’t want to. I want to feel. I want to wrestle with myself, parse through difficult ideas, hold great sadness and great joy inside at the same time, and disappear into someone else’s head for a time.

And so, I am turning towards the medium that used to bring me that fulfillment. Books.

But not just any books — books that see into your soul and make you cry. That’s the criteria I gave when I asked my Instagram following for recommendations, knowing that my thought daughter audience would know exactly what I meant.

I received almost a thousand responses, spanning genre, topic, length, and difficulty level. I have compiled some of the recommendations into this list, so that we can all refer back to it when we need to step outside the internet and back into our own souls. I have not read most of these, so I can’t personally vouch for them, but I have added all of the most frequently recommended titles to my personal reading list and indicated them below.

BOOKS THAT SEE INTO YOUR SOUL AND MAKE YOU CRY:

• Jazz by Toni Morrison

• The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (frequently recommended)

• A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donaghue

• Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini

• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (I can’t count how many times this was recommended)

• The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

• Weyward by Emilia Hart (frequently recommended)

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

• The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller

• I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish

• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

• Educated by Tara Westover

• Normal People by Sally Rooney

• All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

• The Women by Kristin Hannah (recommended countless times and also by my best friend)

• Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy (frequently recommended)

• Babel by RF Kuang (currently reading and highly recommended)

• Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb

• The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

• Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

• The Fabric of our Souls by KM Moronova

• Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow

• Americanah by Chimimanda Adiche

• The Bear by Andrew Krivak

• As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

• The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

• Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey

• All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

• Anxious People by Fredrik Bachman

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

• Night Road by Kristin Hannah

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel

• Inherited Hunger by Rose Brik

• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (highly recommended)

• Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (highly recommended)

• This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Motor and Max Gladstone (highly recommended)

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

• Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

• Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

• The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros

• House of Leaves by Danielewski

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky

• Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

• The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald Basil Edwards

• The Top 5 Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware

• The Red Tent by Wyatt Books

• The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

• The Boy from the Mist by Gary Lonesborough

• Honeybee by Craig Silvey

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

• Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• Watch Over Me by Nina Lacour

• In Memoriam by Alice Winn

• The Rabbit Hutch by Tessa Gunty

• Faithful by Alice Hoffman

• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (frequently recommended)

• White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

• Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson

• If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

• Alone With You in Ether by Olivia Blake (frequently recommended)

• Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod Anderson

• Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

• Betty by Tiffany McDaniel (highly recommended)

• Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

• We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

• Supper Club by Lara Williams

• Grief is the Things With Feathers by Max Porter

• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

• Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T Sullivan

• Hookshot by Kennedy Ryan

• The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest

• Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

• Girlhood by Melissa Febos

• My Antonia by Willa Cather

• One for My Enemy by Olivie Blake

• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

• Go as a River by Shelley Reade

• Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois

• Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins

• Beneath the Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan

• Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

• The Hours by Michael Cunningham

• Norwegian Wood by Murakami

• Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

• No One Gets to Fall Apart by Sarah LaBrie

• Under the Whispering Door - TJ Klune

• A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DF Wallace

• Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

• Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

• In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

• Piranisi by Susanna Clarke (highly recommended)

• The 5 People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

• Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

• A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman

• Assata by Assata Shakur

• The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarros

• More Days at the Morosaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Persuasion by Jane Austen

• No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee